


excerpts from the same party

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Drug Use, Drunk Nights, Multi, lifes rough, parentdale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-31 05:32:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17843414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: “i bet you don’t even miss me,” hermione says nastily. “i bet you don’t even miss me a little.”for some reason he can’t think of the right answer. his mouth tastes like vodka soda and his heart is beating in his wrists. her face is shimmering like a mirage in front of his eyes, far away from him and close up at the same time. he stares at her lips.“do you love me more than you love him?” she asks.





	excerpts from the same party

**i.**

“so she broke up with you to date hiram,” says fp in the black-and-white marble bathroom, bigger than fred’s kitchen - “and now she’s here with hiram, and you want to leave.”

“um… yeah.” fred replies, his response slowed somewhat by the marijuana in his lungs, the stretched-out feeling of being high. fp takes the blunt from his fingers and inhales long - he’s in the bathtub, dry, clothed, reclined like a queen or an emperor.

“the thing is, this is hiram’s house. so i’m thinking you could have forseen this.”

fred just stares at him. fp’s hair is glittering, like someone’s threaded fairy lights through it - the bathroom lights make a halo on his head, glowing through his curls like a supernova crown of thorns. his eyes are two shiny pools of black. it feels like they’re both naked.

“dude, you’re done,” says fp, and puts the roll back between his lips, doesn’t pass it back. fred’s on the counter, feet dangling. “no more for you.”

“i want to go home,” fred repeats uncertainly, suddenly hyper-focused on his red converse shoes, the laces loose on the left one, threatening to plummet off. the counter feels very high, and the black marble floor is easily mistaken for the endless void of outer space. he wonders how he’s breathing.

“we’re not going home when we just got here.”  _rhythm is a dancer_  is on the stereo outside, beating through the party like a heart. the heavy walls shiver. “it’s a big fucking house, you don’t have to see them.”

fred keeps staring at fp, fixated on every part of his face in turn. “do you think they’ve slept together?”

fp groans and lets his head fall back, hitting the tap. “dude, don’t do this.”

“do what?” asks fred and wiggles his ankle imperceptibly, lets his loose shoe fall and plummet to hit with a slap on the marble floor.

**ii.**

“do you love me?” she asks, face bathed in purple light, and she looks like pictures of goddesses, roller-rink disco ball glow and purple cotton candy. fred wants to touch her, run the pads of his fingers along her velvet skin and wrap her glossy hair around his wrist, lick the sparkly lip gloss off her mouth. they’re in a corner of the dance floor and the music is louder than the blood in his head. the only part of his body that exists is his hands. he puts them on her hips, counts the teeth in the crescent-moon uptick of her smile. hiram’s hands have been there. his hands are not allowed there anymore but the smile says keep them and he does.

“yes,” he says reverently, her face is like a candle, pure and glowing with light. he touches her dark hair and her lips and feels dizzy, drinks from the smell of her, sugar and peach and mint. his stomach jumps.

“i bet you don’t even miss me,” hermione says nastily. “i bet you don’t even miss me a little.”

for some reason he can’t think of the right answer. his mouth tastes like vodka soda and his heart is beating in his wrists. her face is shimmering like a mirage in front of his eyes, far away from him and close up at the same time. he stares at her lips.

“do you love me more than you love him?” she asks.

fred’s mouth is very dry. “who?”

“him,” she says intensely, her shifting, pearlescent aura settling in a glow around her face and body.

“yes,” says fred, only because she hasn’t specified, which makes it easier to lie. then they’re kissing on the dance floor, his hands in her hair and her tongue on his teeth, just like it used to be. 

**iii.**

“you don’t have to hold my hair,” he says as he’s heaving, penelope’s short nails raking it back from his scalp (she’s doing a shitty job anyway, there are long strands of hair hanging down at his ears into the toilet bowl, damp with sweat and vomit) - “you have a lot of it,” penelope replies dubiously and fred can’t think of an argument before he’s puking again, hot vodka mixed with old pizza, everything in his stomach.

he resurfaces into what seems like the brightest bathroom on earth - white walls, white floors, white porcelain, shining so brightly that he hides his eyes, ducks his head and stares at his jeans, the dark blotch of his body on the white landscape, counts the flecks of vomit on the white rim of the toilet. he squints to look at penelope who’s skin is washed out by the white, all except her puffy eyelids and nose, which are as red as her hair.

“hal and alice?” he asks, ears buzzing as his eyes adjust, the back of his neck slick with a quarter-inch layer of damp sweat. She juts her chin at him, looking too the worse for wear, her hair in disarray and the lipstick cracked on her raw lips. fresh tears threaten to spill over her eyes, the tear tracks on her cheeks black with mascara. he’s sure he looks no better.

“you saw hiram and hermione, i guess” she shoots back cooly, and then, kinder: “your nose is bleeding.”

he looks down at the white floor and a tiny drop of brilliant red hits the hem of his jeans. he groans and pinches it closed. “i puked too hard.” his voice is cartoonish with his nostrils sealed, his thumb and forefinger wet with blood.

penelope is putting hand sanitizer on her hands. he wonders about her missing glasses, if she has contacts in or has only been squinting. they’re both friendless in this bathroom, which makes them friends, which means he could ask. “i see you throw up at school,” she says.

“my stomach’s fucked up.”

“it’s called an eating disorder.”

“that’s not what it is,” he says, although he’s not sure.

his nose has stopped bleeding, he releases his fingers and she dumps hand sanitizer into his palm, holding the bottle from afar so that it doesn’t touch his skin. the alcohol burns in any little cuts on his skin, mixes with the fresh blood and turns it pink before it evaporates. “gum?” she asks, and he takes some gratefully, though he has a blister pack in his own jeans, flat from kneeling - penelope has the kind that comes in sticks, he pushes it soft around his sore mouth with his tongue.

“do you want to do shots with me and then dance?” he asks.

penelope thinks about it and seems to surprise herself more than anyone when she says yes.

**iv.**

“you have to put ice on that,” tom says after hiram hits him, guiding fred quickly into the kitchen, the two of them leaving a trail of blood drops on the cashmere-soft carpet. “soon, or you’ll regret it tomorrow.” he busies himself at the massive freezer, rummaging for frozen vegetables, fred expects, which of course the lodges don’t buy. fred’s gaze lands on the remnants of drinks on the counter.

“pass me that bottle.”

“i’m not passing you that bottle.” tom replies, pulling a thick frozen steak in a wax-paper wrapper from the depths of the freezer and handing it to him. it oozes gluey blood onto fred’s wrist. “put this on your eye.”

their fingers brush when he hands it over, and fred thinks of yanking tom’s wrist toward him, biting it like a vampire, drawing blood. if fp wanted to be jealous he’d make him jealous.

“hiram’s a psycho,” he says, just to keep tom looking at him. “he boxes and hits people for fun.”

“it’s none of my business, but you were making out with his girlfriend.” tom’s avoiding his gaze, and fred’s heart sinks like a dark stone. “that’s why he hit you.”

“who told hiram?” fred asks, peeling the steak away from his eyes. tom grips his wrist and places it back. “it was fp, wasn’t it? go ahead, tell me. it was fp. i already know.”

tom looks away and up at the ceiling. “sixty days till graduation,” he says to himself. “that’s all.”

**v.**

he stole a two-six of expensive vodka from hiram lodge’s kitchen and he empties half of it into sierra samuels’ red slushie, more than half to be nice, then dumps the rest into his green one. vodka all tastes the same mixed with icee but its smooth going down. they smash plastic cups together on the wet picnic table in the park and toast to graduation. he watches her lips wrap around the straw and thinks about roller rink dates, popcorn mixed with m&ms at the movies, the last time he kissed her. it’s past his curfew and the bugs are out. drunk food turned into convenience store food somewhere on their walk and there’s an empty bag of beef jerky between them that he doesn’t remember eating, only he must have, because sierra’s a vegetarian and she’s been talking so much he doesn’t think she’d have had time to chew.

“everyone thinks i have it all together but i dont,” is what she says now, and fred says he has nothing together too. sierra stares at the horizon and shakes in her blouse and he puts fps jacket around her to keep her warm. “it’s not fair we can’t love who we love,” she says and starts to cry, weeps on his shoulder with her hair in his mouth and he pats her head like a mother, his mouth too sweet and his lips stained green.

“it’s not fair for us,” she says, “it’s not fair, you and fp, me and tommy, that we can’t be together,” and fred says nothing because maybe if he doesn’t say anything she’ll think she made a mistake, that there was never anything between him and fp at all.

**vi.**

“do you have a ride home?” mary asks after almost running him over, and of course he doesn’t, he’s wandering the street outside the party with his lip bleeding and one shoe missing, blood and snot streaming from his nose into his teeth. maybe she only asked as a courtesy because she doesn’t wait for him to answer, hauls him across the street and into her mother’s car, closes the door on him before he breaks down sobbing in her passenger seat.

“who’d you come with?” mary asks, watching him cry. there’s a pair of fluffy dice dangling from the rearview mirror.

“fp” he manages, through his tears and snot. mary stares at his black eye.

“and who hit you?”

“hiram.”

mary swears under her breath. “asshole,” she says. they roll slowly down the street at ten miles an hour, avoiding potholes. fred can’t look at her. it’s like trying to look at the sun. “fp just left you? i don’t believe that.”

“everyone left me.” the self pity tastes good, he rolls it around in his mouth, presses his tongue to the torn flap of it. he draws back into the seat when he recognizes the turn, panicked. “don’t take me home.” he’s too far past curfew for that, too far past wasted, half-covered in blood. “take me to gladys’. it’s okay,” he insists when mary hesitates. “i crash with her a lot.”

“okay,” says mary, “but i’m waking her up. i’m not just dropping you off somewhere if i don’t know you’re safe.”

it occurs to him later that it’s the nicest thing she’s ever said to him, and wholly undeserved.

**vii.**

“i made you another mixtape,” he says in the morning, lips sticky with hangover, eyes crusted shut. gladys is awake beside him, eating a bag of chips, the duvet curled around them. he breathes in the familiar smell of sweat and cigarettes and feels safe.

“is it full of your pretty boy rock shit?” gladys asks.

“yeah.”

“okay, i’ll listen.” fred rolls over and she pulls him in against her, mashes his face to her stomach and lower boob. her voice is more smirk than sympathy. “how are you feeling?”

“eat shit,” says fred, whose bruised eye still stings. she’s wearing fp’s metallica shirt, the ME pressed to his cheek. his mouth and stomach are sour and hollow, his joints stiff and his neck screaming in pain. 

“i only ask because mary tossed you out of her car into my yard because you were throwing up bright green.”

“vodka slushies,” he explains weakly, though it feels like a different night entirely that they’d been on that picnic table, feels like the wrong answer. gladys runs her hands through his hair and scratches his scalp. he tries to be cheerful. “you should have come.”

“hiram lodge’s party? i’d rather put a pencil through my eye.”

fred remembers his shiner and lifts his head from her chest. “do i look like a badass?”

“no. you look like a pathetic loser who made out with his ex-girlfriend and had an awful night.” .

“your room is messy,” says fred. there’s a stack of laundry that looks like the leaning tower of pisa in front of his unbruised eye when he finally cracks it open - the duvet they’re sleeping in is covered in clothes and album sleeves.

“i’m gonna clean it. i went to the hardware store yesterday-”

“how butch of you.”

“shut up.” he can tell from her voice she’s smiling. “i’m going to paint it all black. you want to help?”

“your mom lets you?”

“yeah.”

“okay.”

“okay.” gladys curls a lock of his long hair around her finger and smooths it out.

“gladys, what are we going to do?” fred asks.

“you and me?”

“all of us.”

“we’re going to be fine,” says gladys, lying through her teeth. “we’re going to be just fine.”


End file.
